The invention relates to a military safety helmet with a helmet cap resistant to bombardments and with a band arrangement, as internal equipment, connected firmly to the helmet cap at several points and composed of an approximately horizontally encircling annular supporting band and of bands which extend in a radiating manner from the top side and the ends of which are connected firmly to the supporting band.
In military safety helmets, a known band arrangement is composed of textile bands which are connected to the helmet cap, preferably by riveting, at several, for example, at six, points in the region of the annular supporting band. The purpose of the band arrangement is to keep the skull away from the cap, in order, under the effect of an impact, to avoid transmitting the impact energy directly through the cap to the skull of the helmet wearer. It is possible for the skull to come in contact with the top of the helmet cap only when the textile bands have lengthened to a considerable extent, thereby expending some of the impact energy. Since the band arrangement is fastened directly to the helmet laterally, lateral impacts can be transmitted directly to the skull of the helmet wearer. Since bombardments of the helmet cap are possible and likely from all sides equally, band arrangements of this type are unsuitable for damping the bombardment energy of a wide variety of possible bombardments before it is transmitted to the skull of the helmet wearer.
There are known work safety helmets, the internal equipment of which must satisfy requirements fundamentally different from those in military safety helmets. For this internal equipment, it is known to produce the band arrangement from plastic and, for damping violent impacts on the helmet, to provide, on the outside of the plastic bands, bosses which experience plastic deformation under high impact effect and which thus transmit the impact energy to the skull of the helmet wearer only after it has been damped. It is not possible for bosses to be provided where the radiating bands are fastened to the helmet cap itself. As these points, therefore, impact energies are transmitted to the skull without being damped. The functioning of the internal equipment of work safety helmets of this type is based essentially on the fact that the radiating bands are fastened to the helmet cap and the supporting ring remains movable. In DE-U No. 76 23 197 there is an additional band which makes the connection between the radiating bands and the supporting ring and which is itself not fastened to the helmet cap. This band is located on the rear side of the helmet. The supporting ring is itself connected firmly to the helmet cap on the front side of the helmet. Padding is provided at this location.
Internal equipment known from the work safety helmets cannot be transferred directly to military safety helmets. All-round impact damping could be achieved by means of an inserted Styropor cap in the manner of a motorcycle crash helmet. This design cannot be adopted, however, because it does not allow a sufficient ventilation of the helmet interior. The interior ventilation of crash helmets is based on the capture of the relative wind; therefore, this possibility is not available on military safety helmets.
G.B. Patent No. 1,108,502 discloses an internal equipment for a work safety helmet, which is composed of elastically flexible strips fitted with rectangular ribs close to one another. Two Y-shaped strips extend from an encircling headband in a curve matching the form of the cap to two fastening points located opposite one another. A high density of the shock absorbing ribs cannot be achieved thereby, because the bands are relatively wide and a larger number of bands would result in an excessively high weight of the internal equipment. This internal equipment is not intended for military safety helmets.